Posts by JEverly

BayouTexan Sorry for hijacking your thread.

Quote from BayouTexan

How about try to study specific parts of hit songs that you like and try to incorporate pieces of those into finishing your song? You could take one popular riff, change the tempo, maybe add a rest, and you have an entire new riff no one has ever done before. That could help with some motivation?? I'd like to hear your work.

It is more of just getting the motivation to get in the room and start something. I work in this same room every week day. I think that has something to do with it.

Quote from Wheresthedug

I feel your pain. That is the story of my life. I start an idea. Work on it for a while then decide I don’t like it afterall and start another idea………….

I took on a project for a friend of mine that taught me to not judge too much on something until you spend time putting all of the parts together. he had a bunch of tracks that he had recorded for a song. They were dirty and noisy in spots. It took it as a challenge to make the best sounding mix of it that I could possibly do. It was a ton of work. I cut out sections of the tracks that were just noise and I applied noise gates to some areas. In the end it came out pretty good and he was super surprised at how good it sounded in the end. That taught me to not judge my tracks too harshly until I hear them in a mix and see what I can do with them. If they are total crap after that, I can record them again.

Quote from lightbox

In my humble opinion, a lot of this has to do with sitting alone in your room and getting something done "on your own". Nowadays it's cheap to setup a little homestudio ... and that's great. But it also has plenty of downsides. The purpose of pro studios isn't to provide you with pro hardware and a guy who presses the record button for you while sucking cash out of your pocket.

It's also the communication, advice, suggestions from another pair of (good, experienced and musical) ears. A good engineer / producer will help you tremendously to move forward and get your job done. He will tell you when a take is fine and done (and why) and how to proceed. Over the last 3.5 decades I've seen so many artists struggeling for months to get anything finished ... and once they hit the studio, they are shocked how they can finish an album within a week only.

It's too easy to get obsessed with minuscule details you think you need to "fix". And even if you keep working on these details for days or weeks, it rarely gets better. It's amazing how often a first take or maybe second take will be the one ... rarely the 37th take of the same.

And by the way, it's also fun to work with someone (or more than one). It might take a little to find the right person to work with, it needs to 'click'. But once you find the right one, it's eye opening. Being a lone wolf or caveman often is a huge hindrance for projects. Exceptions prove the rule, haha.

Just my 2cents (and years of experience and observation), of course.

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I would love to have someone to write and record with. I think that would help a lot. Then I would be in the position where we schedule time and I have to be there to participate. I have been keeping an eye out locally to see if there is anyone that I may mesh with well for something like this but have not really found anyone. I just saw my brother recently and we live about 2000 miles apart. I suggested to him that we should collaborate from remote to see what comes out of it.

I have a different problem. I have all of the equipment and I have years of experience mixing. I have been having a horrible time getting myself motivated to spend time with my equipment and getting creative. I started a song a couple of months ago and I got a good flow going and I created about 2/3 of a song over a weekend, mostly one day. I have not had the motivation to get back to it and finish it. That seems to happen to me a lot and I just never finish the songs. I am really at a loss as to how to fix this.

I just went down this long road in the fall of last year. Here is my take on this.

I have been a Pro Tools user. They upped the price on it to where it was costing me $200 per year for the license. To me that is too much money to spend every year when I don't make any money doing this. That caused me to start looking. I have both Mac and PC machines so I wanted something that I could run on both, like I could with Pro Tools.

I run my stuff on a Macbook Pro. I purchased Logic Pro X. It is pretty good and has a ton of good stuff in it for plugins and capability. If you run on a Mac, I would definitely take a good hard look at this. All future updates are free once you purchase it. The down side is it only runs on Mac.

I would highly recommend if you are on Windows to download Cakewalk and give that a try. It is free. I installed it but have not made it back to it to test it out. On paper it looks like it should do what most of us need from a DAW and it is FREE.

I used Reaper years ago when it was free. I liked it enough to take a look at it again. It will run on either system and is like $60. That is a one time registration and it provides a license for more than one computer. I have it installed on both my Mac and Windows machines. One thing that I see people complain about with this DAW is the limited plugins it has. There is a freeware plugin stack that you can get for it. I have not tried that yet. However, for the price of admission it is definitely worth picking it up and giving it a try.

I ended up buying Cubase on a crossgrade license discount to replace Pro Tools. So far it does everything I need and it runs on both systems. This is a lot higher price of admission and I am betting either Cakewalk or Reaper will do what you need.

Great first post! You should get some great replies when you start out with a tone like that. My recommendation is to delete your post and wait until you are over the emotions and then post again asking for assistance and information without the tone.

There may be more notes in the actual profile if you add it to your Kemper and open it in Rig Manager. Some of the creators put numbers in to represent the microphone that was used or possibly the cabinet. It is difficult to tell without more information. That is where the profile notes may help.

Quote from Kim_Olesen

They are extremely different. It really is a mystery. Fat 50s were parts of the specifications for the American Standard line from 2009 untill they around the time when the elite series were introduced.

I put a full set of custom shop Fat 50's in a very early American Special strat and I like them. I have played strats that came with them stock and they definitely sounded different.

My wife has never suggested that I just go out and buy a new guitar. However, there have been several times when I have been on the fence about buying one and she has told me that I should but it, so I did. I definitely found a keeper when I found her over 30 years ago.

I am mostly a hobby guitarist that makes a side income playing gigs. I think that is why she is good with the gear purchases. I make some money with the gear to help offset the purchases. I never cover the full cost but it definitely helps take the sting out of the purchases.

Quote from Kim_Olesen

The one in the middle. A mint condition 2009 american standard strat. Bought it recently from a collegue who had only used it for two hours. I’ve been on the lookout for a 2009 american standard strat for ages. The white one is one too. It is the absolute best year for strats imho.

Funnily enough the pickups on the white steat weren’t the same ones as in the sunburst. Eventhough i bought the white from new, the pickups in the white were amazing, while the ones in the sunburst were fat 50s (which i hate). So i changed the pickups (and the white pickguard to a black one) to get the sound i wanted.

I have enquired with Fender what pickups were on the first batch of 2009 american standard strats, but noone knows. They ought to have been fat 50s, but my guess is that they got rid of some stock of other unidentifiable pickups (perhaps ones from the old series) and i just got lucky and found them.

The Blade strat is fantastic too. It had all the electronics changed when i bought it (and i changed all of it too). I also had the neck modified, as the shoulders were too wide for me. That guitar has a very Stevie Ray Vaughan like tone, in the sense that it really digs in on the transients.

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I have heard that the custom shop fat 50's are a bit different than the ones they put in guitars as stock pickups. Maybe they are two different versions of the same pickups?

You are getting good advice here. The key is in the mids. One guy needs to be stronger in the upper mids and the other in the lower mids. Then you will both be heard. Neither will sound stellar on their own but together, they will sound huge.

Mudchild I agree with what DonPetersen has been telling you. Try adjusting the pickups you have first and see if you can get them to where you like them. If you can't get them there figure out what you are hearing that you don't like. You can then select a pickup that addresses that issue. From what you mentioned in the OP, I would say to look at the Pearly Gates SD pickups. Those are nice and clear and of a vintage wind.

I had a set of Seth Lover SD pickups in a guitar and while they sounded good, I had a little bit of a feedback issue with them at gig volumes. I swapped them over to the Pearly Gates pickups because they are basically the same spec but are wax potted. They sound great in that guitar. That is the type of issue that would require a pickup swap. The issue I had was because the Seth Lover pickups are not potted so they are more prone to being a bit microphonic and feedback with gain.

I have QSC K8s and K12s. They are the first version of the speakers. They sound good with the Kemper. You have to get the switches on them set right. Everyone sets them to deep and then you get too much bass from them when you turn them up. I have used the K12 speakers along with the KSubs for my mains for a good while now and think they are some of the best sounding speakers you can have pushing out your sound.

I have played around a bit with profiling some pedals as direct profiles. I have had varying results. You have to run them loud or they tend to be kind of dark. I liked the sound of some of them through a PA speaker but didn't like them at all through my DAW. It would be interesting to be able to do them as an actual pedal and use it with a profile. That would allow me to profile my pedals on my pedal board and run them with the profile of my amp.

If you strum the chord on the guitar without it being plugged in does it sustain at a satisfactory length of time? That would rule out the action or pickup height or anything else with the guitar.

Do you have other rigs that sustain better? If you can switch from one rig to another and there is a difference, it has to be something setup on the profile.

I would recommend getting the volume down into the green. You can always pump the volume up in whatever is amplifying the sound down the chain. Pushing an amp into overdrive sounds good. Pushing a digital device into overdrive sounds terrible.

I ran a little test once just for the heck of it. I set my Mesa on one side of the room and dialed up as heavy of a gain tone as I could on it and then I set my JSX amp on the other side of the room and set it to super clean. The sound in the middle of the room was freaking awesome. I understood why this became a huge recording trick at that moment. I don't really play gigs where I could do something like this but I wish I did. I would run that setup and love it. It is good that you can dial some of this in with the Kemper. I actually didn't know that was possible. I will be looking into that now. Thank you for posting about it.

Sounds great! Good work.

No. However, IMHO, it is always a good thing when you can avoid a conversion from digital to analog or the other way around. Using SPDIF will eliminate one conversion.

I built my profiles for playing live. I put a QSC K8 on a stand in my room and then put my amp next to it. I set my amp to the volume I would normally gig at. I then turned the mixer up to get the same volume out of the K8. That is the volume I dialed it in at and made it sound like the amp did in the room. I honestly didn't have to do much tweaking at all since I profiled that amp at that volume right were it was setting. I am very happy with the results of doing it this way.

I then did a little recording last month. I didn't like the sound of my profiles at all. They were too dark. I had to make some adjustments and select a guitar that had a thinner sound to get tones I was happy with. Volume is everything with these units. If I can get myself to spend more time recording, I will make a copy of my profiles and tweak them to sound like I want them to for recording. IMHO, if you are using the unit for both purposes, you are going to need profiles dialed in for each use.

I was actually surprised at how different the same profiles sounded. With what I experienced, I don't think I would try to dial in profiles for live use through headphones. That may work for dialing them in for recording. My plan going forward will be to dial them in for the specific use case that I am going to use them in.

Quote from wrbi

I thought there was a Profile of a patch cable on rig exchange.

But i do not find it any more

I am pretty sure there was one up there. I remember someone in the thread where Don mentioned this before saying they uploaded one.

Quote from DonPetersen

Or you can profile a patch cable (from send to return) to get a totally transparent Profile with the added benefit of the great AMP parameters like Definition, Compression, Clarity, Pick etc.

Eddiebaby, Do this! Don suggested this to me last year some time. I was very surprised how good the profile came out.